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Intelligence Squared
What led to the Iranian Revolution the rise of the Islamic Republic? With Scott Anderson
00:33:42
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Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode, foreign reporter and war correspondent Scott Anderson joins us to discuss his new book, King of Kings, a gripping account of the fall of the Shah of Iran, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the rise of the Islamic Republic. Together with our host, Hannah Lucinda Smith, he explores how the west misread the signs of the revolution, the forces that toppled the Shah, and how those events continue to shape Iran and the Middle east today. Let's join our host Hannah now with.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
More welcome To Intelligence Squared, I'm Hannah Lucinda Smith. Our guest today is Scott Anderson, a veteran foreign reporter and war correspondent and a contributing writer for the New York Times. Over his career he's reported from Bosnia, Libya, Palestine and across the Middle East. His new book, King of Kings, is a gripping account of the fall of the Shah of Iran, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Scott thanks so much, Hannah.
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Scott Anderson
It's my pleasure to be here.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
So although your book focuses on the people around the Shah, he's very much the subject of the book. Why did you decide to write about Reza Pahlavi and why now?
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Scott Anderson
So I was actually in Washington D.C. when the Shah came to visit President Carter for the first time on a state visit on mid November of 1977. And it turned into kind of a public relations disaster for the Shah. He was met by some 4,000 anti Shah demonstrators and unfortunately they had made the decision to play his arrival in Washington on Iranian national television live. So people back in Iran saw their king being humiliated in the streets of Washington. And a lot of people kind of credit that moment with the start of the Iranian revolution because really within days after that there was the first big anti Shah demonstrations inside Iran. Having been there at the sort of, you know, the moment when things started, I became really fascinated by it. I had actually traveled through Iran with my father as a kid, as a 15 year old kid, and been fascinated by it. So I took a real interest in it. And I think the question that always puzzled me, as it did a lot of people, about the Iranian revolution was just how did it happen? With most revolutions there's a feel of once it gets going, there's a feeling of it builds to a climax. Either the regime finally crumbles, but there's this inexorable quality. Often to revol certainly wasn't that in Iran there were long periods of calm, relative calm, long periods when it looked like the Shah was going to ride through this without any problem and other times when it looked like he was going to go at any moment. So the very mystery of how the Iranian revolution played out really fascinated me. And I mean, that's where I really felt that there was a core mystery here of how did this happen? Because I really felt there was nothing that really inevitable about it at all.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
And a lot of the book is focusing on the shahs in the circle, the people, the very few people who had access to him and influence over him. Out of those people, who do you think was the most influential the remarkable.
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Scott Anderson
Thing about all three of the main protagonists in the story, the Shah, Khomeini and Jimmy Carter, was that in each case, the inner circle was tiny. In the Shah's case, it really comes down to two people. Khomeini comes down to three people. But weirdly enough, it's even true with Carter that at every kind of high moment of the flashpoint of the Iranian revolution, Carter, by weird coincidence, was involved in something that seemed more pressing at the moment. So he fell back on the same very small handful of advisors on Iran. In the Shah's case, it really came down to two people. It was his, a longtime confidant, a man named Asadollah Alam, who was also the minister of the Imperial court. And they met every day for anywhere from a half hour to five, six hours. And he was the one man who would kind of stand up to the Shah at times. Unfortunately for the Shah, when the revolution started, Asadoll Alam was dying, and he died a few months into the revolution. The other person was his wife, Farah. And I had the good fortune of having a long interview with Farah for the book. And she also had to pick and choose when she decided to disagree with her husband. Very carefully. Sometimes he listened to her. She was very smart. Well, still is. She's just turned 87, but she's still around. She had a feel for the street of Iran that the Shah never had. She had a charisma about her and just a sense of the Iranian people that the Shah did not have. And again, sometimes we'd listen to her, and to his peril and ultimate detriment, he would not listen to her.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
At times, I think the character that fascinated me most in the book was Farah, Reza Pahlavi's wife. Can you tell me a little bit more about her and how did you get to meet her?
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Scott Anderson
It took a very long time to set up to meet her. She divides her time between Paris and Washington. I met her, the Shah's aide de camp, one of the only people who flew out of Iran with them on the day they went into exile. And he's kind of been in the royal circle ever since, and kind of through this man named Cambiz Adebay. I got to Farah, and it's been a long day with her down in the Washington, D.C. area. And I was really so impressed by her. And I have to say, I had this moment with her that was kind of one of the most remarkable moments of my journalist career. What happened towards the end of the revolution? The Shah Started throwing people overboard to try to try to appease the masses. Obviously it didn't work. But one of the people he was debating throwing over or having arrested on charges was his former prime minister, a man named Amir Abbas Hoveda, who had been prime minister for 13 years. Hoveda was probably the only person in the Shah's inner circle who wasn't a scoundrel. He was a very simple man. He lived in a two bedroom apartment. He drove himself to work every day. He was a bibliophile. When he retired from being prime minister, he wanted to open a bookstore in Tehran. You know, stole no money. And he was very, very close to Farah. Farah was college educated. She'd gone to the School of Architecture in Paris. And Hoveda as this Renaissance man, probably the only Renaissance man in the Shah's inner circle, Farah and Hoveda were very, very close. So in this meeting where the Shah is talking about who to arrest, he rounds up a group of kind of corrupt government ministers and generals. And because Hoveda had been prime minister for so long, of course he'd made enemies in the inner circle. So it was his move to arrest Hoveda. Also. Farah was in the meeting. She did not speak up for Hoveda, so he was arrested. When the revolution happened, Hoveda, he was under house arrest, and he could have gotten out very easily. He refused to leave Iran because he said, I've done nothing wrong. And he ends up being executed by Homais executioners. So when I was interviewing Farah, I went back to that meeting that she was at, that kind of sealed Hoveda's fate. And I said, okay, the other people, they make sense. They had human rights abuses, they stole billions or whatever. I said, but why Hoveda? And it was the closest she got to tears. This very long interview I had with her, she really got very quite choked up. And she said, we did it to save ourselves. And just the emotional honesty of that moment, I remember that the hair on my arms just went up. I mean, that she would just say so unvarnished, that that was the reason. It was all about self preservation. Very few people would do that. They make up other stuff. But. So I just found her really a really remarkable figure. And she, because she had this common touch, she really had a sense of the Iranian people. Number one, because she was a Westernizer, she refused to ever wear a headscarf except if she went into a mosque. She made a point of going to construction sites where she'd be photographed of the papers. And again, not wearing a headscarf because she went out of her way to present herself as a Westernized woman. The fundamentals probably hated her even more than they hated the Shah because she represented everything they hated. And the last thing I was gonna say on her, she saw the danger coming way before, even before, way before the revolution started, about, probably about two, three years before. And she tried to warn her husband. At one point in 19, I believe it was 1975, she said, I think the people are getting tired of us. And he wouldn't hear it, just silly woman, you know, to his ultimate detriment.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
It's interesting when you talk about, you know, these leaders with very small circles around them. Maybe this is a bit of a loaded question, but do you see any parallels with current world leaders in that sense?
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Scott Anderson
No, absolutely. You know, I can't speak really so well to British politics, but certainly you're in Turkey. I don't think Erdogan listens to, I don't know, he maybe listens to one or two people. I think you have an unusual situation in the United States right now where I think that the real power is not Donald Trump. It's three or four people behind him that are kind of dictating what he should do and what he should say. I don't think he's smart enough to be. And one thing about the Shah and I think is true about Erdogan in Turkey, I think even their enemies would acknowledge they're very smart men. And I don't know that many people have accused Donald Trump of that.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
So, yeah, I mean, it's almost like the dictator's dilemma, isn't it? You know, the more powerful that you get, the less people are willing to say no to you or to tell you that maybe your idea is not a great one and that can ultimately sort of lead to your downfall, as with the Shah.
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Scott Anderson
That's right. You know, it's interesting you say that. That first occurred to me. I interviewed Muammar Gaddafi a number of years ago in Libya, and it struck me as there's this weird irony that the more repressive the regime and the Shah's Iran was not, certainly not as repressive as Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Assads in Syria. But the more you push your opposition underground out of fear, the less you know about your opposition. And so you really. And it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that you, you lose touch with your own people. And I was very, I really felt that in Libya with Gaddafi, that these people had been so many decades of being under the thumb of Gaddafi and his secret police and never having made sort of an independent decision of their own, that almost their decision making gene had atrophied. And it was really kind of remarkable. I think the same thing happened in Iran.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
One thing that I find really fascinating when I'm talking with certain Iranian exiles here in Istanbul and other places, there is a sense of nostalgia for the Shah amongst many people and even within Iran itself. What do you think's behind that?
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Scott Anderson
I think it is a nostalgia because, again, the Shah, yes, he had political prisoners. It was a repressive regime, it was a fabulously corrupt regime, but it was also moving forward in many ways. There were not tens of thousands of political prisoners in the Shah's prisons. The literacy rate had doubled in the country. The life expectancy had tripled. Hundreds of thousands of women were getting college educations. There was this. As uneven as it was, there was this sense of progress happening in Iran. And I think certainly for the last 15 to 20 years in Iran especially, there's been this utter economic stagnation, certainly, I mean, for 40 years, political stagnation or 45 years. So I think there is this nostalgia for what they once had. Iran was the most Westernized. I mean, if you want to put it in terms of Westernization, which of course not everybody does, but it was certainly the most westernized of any country in the Middle east, with the possible exception of Lebanon. And things were going pretty well for most people. That said, I've never felt among the Iranian diaspora, there is a huge. I feel it's more anti current regime than it is pro Trump Shah. Even among people who supported the Shah and are nostalgic, I never have gotten a sense that there was this great love or adoration of the Shah.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah. And I think one of the interesting things about Iran is that there is very little in the way of sort of appealing organized opposition, actually, either within or outside the country. So maybe it's a kind of void that people fill with this. Yeah. This sort of rosy image of the Shah.
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Scott Anderson
I think that's right. I think that's right. And you know, again, so most of the people in the diaspora, of course, are from the wealthy or the upper middle class, and they were the people who benefited most from the Shah's regime. What's interesting, I find even now with Farah, with his widow, there is still, I think it was always the case there was much more affection for Farah than there was for the Shah. And that has certainly continued on.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
As you said a bit earlier, you know, it was never Inevitable that the Shah was going to fall in 1979. If he had weathered that storm and hung on, what do you think Iran would look like today?
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Scott Anderson
Wow. It's a great question, if you can imagine that arc continuing. I think he was headed for a constitutional crisis regardless. One thing that he was clearly concerned about, of course he was ill, which the Americans didn't know, the outside world didn't know. And because he was so secret about his medical care, he was actually hate facing his own death. He was imagining the country being handed over to his eldest son, the Crown Prince, and clearly was nervous about that. The Crown Prince, like Donald Trump, has never been held out as a great genius. And so I think that if he were dying or getting very ill, which was probably going to be happening in three or four years anyway, I think you were headed for a wall. I think what might have succeeded was if earlier on, the Shah had started doing political reforms. He started doing them in 1976, about a year before the revolution, probably in anticipation of Jimmy Carter, who was the great human rights president, in anticipation of him coming into office. The Shah's problem with that is that he was seen by his own people, whether they liked him or hated him, the Shah was always seen as the American Shah. So when he started doing these reforms and releasing political prisoners in 1976, he didn't get any credit for it. It was all seen as, oh, he was doing the Americans bidding. So it reinforced in this perverse way, it reinforced the idea that he was a lackey of the Americans to his opposition and something about the kind of Iranian psyche. They saw his reforms as a sign of weakness, the personal weakness, that he was running scared. So when the revolution got started and the more concessions he's making, he promises to have free and democratic elections the following summer. People don't go, oh, that's great, we will just wait it out. We'll have these elections next year. They said, okay, he's scared. Let's keep pushing, let's keep pushing. So in his perverse way, almost anything he did once the ball got rolling was going to backfire on him.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
And at what point do you think he realized that it had backfired and he was going to lose control of.
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Scott Anderson
His country very, very late. That's. I mean, that's the astonishing thing. The Shah was a brilliant man, I mean, but one of the most contradictory characters, certainly the most contradictory character I've ever written about. And I've written about T. Lawrence, Lawrence Verradi, I believe Shah's even weirder Than him, you know, horribly insecure, needed constant affirmation, obsessed with protocol, but brilliant, imperious, but deeply insecure. I think a key element that a lot of people don't realize about the Iran or see about the Iranian revolution is that I think along with the religious fervor, there was a very strong element of kind of anti colonial. It was kind of like the last anti colonial uprising because the Shah was so wetted at the hip to the Americans. And the Shah was incredibly slow in realizing the danger of that. There was a massacre during the revolution in Tehran where about 150, maybe 200 people were killed by Iranian army soldiers. The Shah was kind of in shock over it. It was by far the bloodiest day during the revolution. He appealed to the Americans, to Carter, to come out with a public declaration of support to him. The Carter administration, as obtuse as they were about inept, about almost everything with Iran, they realized this is the worst thing, both for them and for the Shah to come out and voice support immediately after a massacre. So instead, they arranged to have a private telephone conversation between Carter and the Shah. Just a brief kind of condolence call that went on for about six minutes. But the Shah had that telephone conversation recorded, he had it transcribed, and he demanded all the papers in Iran run it on the front page of their papers. So all it did was, now the Americans were not only supporting the Shah, now they were supporting massacres in the street. And so it was pouring gasoline on the fire, petrol on the fire. So he was just incredibly obtuse about this stuff. So I think it was not until very, very late. The one other thing I'll say on this to his benefit, I guess, as a human being, is that he said many, many times that if saving my throne means I have to kill the young generation of my country, I won't do it. The Iranian revolution was, in fact, not nearly as bloody as a lot of people imagine it was, and certainly not as bloody as the opposition said it was. They talk about anywhere from 80,000 to 150,000 people killed. In actual fact, after the revolution, after Khomeini's people came to power, they did a census of the kill during the revolution, and they came up with a number of about 2,500 people. And this is the Khomeini regime coming up with it. So it really was not that. I mean, of course, 2,500 people is a lot of people, but it was not this bloodbath that people kind of imagined. So really, I think kind of the Shah's credit. He saw that equation of like, there's just a limit to how many people I'm going to let die to to save my throat.
- [22:46]
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
And why do you think that Western countries, and particularly the US misread the situation in Iran so badly and continue to do so today?
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Scott Anderson
Right, right, yeah, absolutely. This, this almost sounds, it sounds a bit facetious to say, but I think the reason the American, the ultimate reason why the Americans so missed the boat is because they just could not imagine Iran. The Shah's Iran was such an important ally to the United States, they just couldn't imagine kind of life without him. So they didn't imagine it. But the whole apparatus of both inside Iran or the Iranian government and the American government, everything was geared to seeing no problems. The Shah hated it when Western ambassadors talked to even his moderate opposition in Tehran. He would call the ambassador and the next day and would give him a dressing down. So very quickly, as the more important Iran became as an ally politically, militarily, economically, the less the ambassadors would ever risk it. Certainly Americans didn't. So the whole. And then on the American side, everything was geared to only see sunny skies in Iran. So the few added the problem that the CIA was doing no domestic intelligence. The CIA station in Tehran was one of the biggest in the world, did no domestic intelligence. They were all focused on spying on the Soviet Union, which is right on the northern border of Iran. They got all their domestic intelligence from the Shah's secret police. So they were just in this loop. The few people at the embassy, there was very few people at the American Embassy, which was 300 people. Yeah. One of the largest embassies in the world. You could count the number of people who spoke Farsi, the Iranian language, certainly on two hands if not on one at any given time, the few people who did speak Farsi, they often saw problems because they were out on the street actually talking to, not to government ministers, but to people in the bazaars and stuff. And they would warn that this was coming. And in one famous case, a guy I spent a lot of time talking about in my book, he would raise it again and again and not only was he ignored, he was punished for raising these issues and finally sent off to a provincial city to be a consular officer. So the entire apparatus certainly of the Americans was designed to see no problems. And once the revolution got started, it just kept perpetuating and it never really stopped. And the bizarre thing is it even was replicated in the period after the revolution happened in February of 1979 through the next nine months until the American hostages were taken in that November. So this nine month period where the revolution was, was solidifying itself and Khomeini was taking over and calling America the Great Satan. Even then it was this weird delusionary optimism. It's like, well, yeah, okay, they'll let them do their little anti American thing for a while, but ultimately they're going to come back. They need us. All their weaponry, all their weaponry is American. They need our economic expertise, they need to serve their oil to us. All these things that, that made them think that, okay, let Khomeini kind of rant and stuff now, but it's all going to work out in the end. So it's just delusion from beginning to end.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
The subtitle of your book is the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East. To what extent do you think the events of 1979 in Iran have a bearing on what's happening in the region today?
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Scott Anderson
I think it's not just the unmaking of the modern Middle East. I think it's the unmaking of the modern world. Because what, what Iran did was it unleashed this era of religious nationalism that you are now seeing not just in Islam, but you're seeing it in every religion you're seeing. I mean even Buddhists, people always have this idea that Buddhist is so pacific and everything, but the Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka were the ones who kind of started the ethnic war against the Tamil Hindus, certainly in this country, the Christian nationalists in the United States, who, this whole marriage of them with, with kind of the neo Nazis and stuff. So there's been this. So I can't say the roots of all this are from Iran, but Iran was the first religious counter revolution the world has ever seen. And I think it hit something that was maybe below the radar at the time, that there was this kind of counter revolution happening in thought and in political discourse around the world. This kind of rejection, maybe a rejection of modernity, a rejection of women's liberation, and that kind of made it burst open. And certainly I've been covering conflicts in the Middle east almost ever since the Iranian revolution, and I see traces of what happened in Iran everywhere. And not just the obvious ones are Iran's proxy allies in the region, Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen. But that whole religious fervor, ISIS is on the opposite side of the Shia regime in Iran. But again, this kind of religious militancy, and I mean, the Iranian regime has killed people in the name of Allah, as has isis. I mean, ISIS obviously is a far more homicidal group, but this. This is legitimating murder.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Yeah. I find it quite a huge irony that the Iranian regime propped up Bashar Al Assad, who actually was far closer in many ways as a ruler to the Shah than to what came after, who was then himself felled by, as you say, this kind of religious fundamentalism that ultimately was inspired by the Iranian revolution, where the Sunniyo Shia.
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Scott Anderson
That's right. That's right. And, yeah, the circle of ironies in that region is amazing. And the one I talk about briefly in my book is that Iran and Iraq under the Baathists in Iraq, both before and with sad. Saddam Hussein, they were mortal enemies with the Shah because he was an imperialist and kingdom and everything. So they helped. You know, they gave asylum to Khomeini, and Khomeini was operating out of southern Iraq for 14 years. But at certain points, Saddam Hussein realized, you know, this Shia resurgence in Iran has a really good chance of blowing back on us because we have a huge Shia population also. So he actually offered to kill Khomeini to the Shah, and to the Shah turned him down. So Khomeini ends up getting kicked out of Iraq, goes to Paris, where he's available to the entire world's media, and that just. This is only two, three months before the end of the revolution. And this just accelerated everything dramatically. If he had stayed in Iraq, they could have kept him kind of bottled up. But that made the Iranian revolution the world's attention at that point.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
What do you think is next for Iran?
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Scott Anderson
Great question. I think we're at a very odd moment in Iran where as a regional power, they've been dramatically muzzled by. They've had their proxy allies throughout the region knocked out. One by one, mostly by the Israelis. At the same time, I'm in kind of discreet touch with a number of people in Iran, most of whom would consider themselves in the opposition to some degree. And since the Israeli and American bombings in June, almost all of them, almost everybody I've spoken to feels incredibly despondent that what's happened is there's been this tremendous rallying around the flag effect to the benefit of the regime. It turns out that even if you oppose the government, you really don't appreciate your country being bombed by foreign powers. And now the problem for the opposition is if they come out and protest against the regime, they can be immediately tarred as lackeys of the Israelis and the Americans. Iranians love conspiracy theories. And one conspiracy theory I've been hearing since the bombings is that, and I've been hearing this from well educated, otherwise sane people, that there was a secret deal cut between Netanyahu and the Iranian regime because both need each other. So when you have Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, coming out in the middle of the Israeli bombing campaign in Iran and saying this is about regime change, I mean, what's the domestically, what effect is that going to have inside Iran? It absolutely played to the benefit of the regime. So in short, to answer your question, I think as far as a regional player, as a regional power, I think they're much diminished, but they may be stronger now internally than they've been in a long time because of this rallying around the flag effect.
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Hannah Lucinda Smith
Scott, thank you. That was Scott Anderson, author of King of the Fall of the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle east, which is available now online and in stores. I'm Hannah. Lucinda Smith. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [33:30]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts.
- [33:55]
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